High deuteration of methanol in L1544

Abstract

Isotopic fractionation is a very powerful tool to follow the evolution of material from one stage to the next in the star-formation process. Pre-stellar cores exhibit some of the highest levels of deuteration because their physical conditions greatly favor deuteration processes. Deuteration maps are a measure of the effectiveness of the deuteration across the core, and they are useful to study both the deuteration as well as the formation mechanism of the main species. Methanol is the simplest O-bearing complex organic molecule (COM) detected in the interstellar medium (ISM). It represents the beginning of molecular complexity in star-forming regions, thus a complete understanding of its formation and deuteration is a necessary step to understand the development of further chemical complexity. In this paper, we use single-dish observations with the IRAM 30 m telescope and state-of-the-art chemical models to investigate the deuteration of methanol towards the prototypical pre-stellar core L1544. We also compare the results of the chemical models with previous observations of deuterated methanol towards the pre-stellar cores HMM1 and L694-2. The spectra extracted from the CHD${}_2$OH map show that the emission is concentrated in the center and towards the north-west of the core. Using deep observations towards the dust and the methanol peaks of the core, we derive a very large deuterium fraction for methanol ($\sim 20\%$) towards both peaks. The comparison of our observational results with chemical models has highlighted the importance of H-abstraction processes in the formation and deuteration of methanol. Deep observations combined with state-of-the-art chemical models are of fundamental importance in understanding the development of molecular complexity in the ISM. Our analysis also shows the importance of non-LTE effects when measuring the D/H ratios in methanol.

Accepted for publication in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry (Eric Herbst Festschrift)

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